22 March 2023
During an inspection looking at part of the service
New HQ (known as Eden Brook Home Care) is a domiciliary care agency providing personal care to people in their own homes. The service provides support to older people, people with physical disabilities and those living with dementia. At the time of our inspection there were 98 people using the service.
Not everyone who used the service received personal care. CQC only inspects where people receive personal care. This is help with tasks related to personal hygiene and eating. Where they do, we also consider any wider social care provided. There were 97 people supported with personal care at this inspection.
People’s experience of using this service and what we found
Improvements were being made to staff training and supervision records to ensure people received safe care. The provider acted to respond to potential risks relating to medication, incidents or accidents. People had risk assessments in place to guide staff. Staff demonstrated effective infection prevention and control practice. Staff were recruited safely. There were sufficient staff available to support people consistently, and to meet their needs and preferences. Most people told us they were satisfied with the safety and quality of the care.
Whilst improvements had been made since the last inspection, these needed to be embedded and sustained to check any changes to systems and processes were effective. We have made a recommendation a system for monitoring this is established. Some record keeping was unstructured and informal. The nominated individual took action straight away, including introducing a provider-level audit as an additional level of oversight following our feedback. The service worked well in partnership with other professionals, such as the local hospice. Staff and people told us the service had improved.
For more details, please see the full report which is on the CQC website at www.cqc.org.uk
Rating at last inspection and update
The last rating for this service was requires improvement (published 18 January 2023) and there were breaches of regulation. The provider completed an action plan after the last inspection to show what they would do and by when to improve. At this inspection we found improvements had been made and the provider was no longer in breach of regulations.
Why we inspected
We undertook a targeted inspection to check whether the Warning Notices we previously served in relation to Regulation 12 and Regulation 17 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 had been met. We use targeted inspections to follow up on Warning Notices or to check concerns. They do not look at an entire key question, only the part of the key question we are specifically concerned about. Targeted inspections do not change the rating from the previous inspection. This is because they do not assess all areas of a key question.
However, during the course of the inspection we found additional improvements had been made, so we widened the scope of the inspection to become a focused inspection which included the key questions of safe and well-led.
For those key questions not inspected, we used the ratings awarded at the last inspection to calculate the overall rating. The overall rating for the service has changed from requires improvement to good. This is based on the findings at this inspection.
You can read the report from our last comprehensive inspection, by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for New HQ on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.
Recommendations
We have made a recommendation about developing a process to monitor and review the implementation of new oversight systems, to ensure they are effective and sustained.
Follow up
We will continue to monitor information we receive about the service, which will help inform when we next inspect.